Flashback 2003: Lumbering fears not all that bad

     For a guy who likes to loaf, I hate being sick. I suppose most people do. That drained, feverish feeling. Gobbling Tums to settle the stomach. Hours sprawled in bed, flipping through a book — P.G. Wodehouse, not as funny as I recall — or the random hodgepodge of Facebook videos. I looked at a table saw on the Home Depot yesterday, and today half the videos are woodworking porn. I can't figure out how to make it stop,
     At 4 p.m. I ventured into my office to figure out something for tomorrow. Maybe Robert Louis Stevenson, the bard of being sick at home. "When I was sick and lay abed, I had two pillows at my head..."
     Nah, too much effort. Into the archive, looking for columns that take place in bed. I found this, too fun not to share. This was part of the "Hammered and Nailed" series of columns I wrote about repair in our home section. You might recall, I outlined the Fort last November.  Too soon for another installment, but I really feel as if someone hit me behind the ear with a sock of nickels, so this will have to do. If you decide to read it, strap in: it's twice as along as my usual column. Back in the day when we had time on our hands and newsprint to fill.

     Night. Bed. Sleep. A crash and then the tumble of lumber. Unmistakably. I was on my feet in an instant, moving fast toward the door, thinking, "The Fort has fallen over." I stopped, went back, got my pants, started to leave, then checked the clock: 3:19 a.m.
     Hurrying through the darkened house, I braced myself for the sight. Timbers lying in a shattered heap. All that work and money for nothing. My wife would laugh at me about it for the rest of my life. The Fort has fallen over.
     Still, somewhere deep down I was relieved. Cart the ruins away, I told myself. Be done with it. My own fault. My folly. I had haughtily rejected the premade forts as beneath my fever dreams of fatherhood, instead designing my own Taj Mahal Fort, 15 feet high with a 90-square-foot floor plan. The lumber alone cost $1,700.
     When I began work, on Father's Day, at 5:30 a.m., I was energetic, excited. I had marked with four little red flags on metal rods where the concrete supports would go. Concrete a yard deep. I would do it right. I had carefully dug around the 10-inch cardboard concrete form, removed the circle of sod, and then dug down. And down.
     If you've never dug a hole, it's hard work. Not so much the first foot, or even the second foot. But that third foot. Each hole took about 90 minutes to dig. Still, the process was very satisfying. It's hard to mess up a hole. Sometime that morning my wife and boys came out with a glass of lemonade and sang "Happy Father's Day," and that was nice.
     After digging the first two holes, I poured the concrete. Also a backbreaking-yet-satisfying experience. I mixed the concrete with a shovel in a big plastic trough, then spooned it into the holes. Before it set, I positioned the big metal brackets for the 6-by-6 beams. I carefully checked them with a level, ensuring a solid foundation.
     At the end of the day, I cleaned up, hosed out the trough, looked at these two little 10-inch circles of concrete, with their metal brackets sticking out. It seemed a lot of work for two holes.
     The second day I did it again, for the other two holes. The work seemed to go easier. There was one truly frightening moment — I thought I had put the brackets in too soon for the first holes, so I waited until I had filled the fourth hole with concrete before I tried to sink the bracket in the third. Big mistake. I went to shove the metal into the wet cement. It went down halfway and then stopped. Sick with fear, I contemplated having to dig up the entire mess of drying concrete and repour it.
     At that moment my wife wandered over. She can smell panic, and has a genius for happening by at the pinnacle of crisis. She stood smiling at me, her Mister Handy.
     Sweating like a pig, I fixed a false grin on my face and gave the metal bracket a mighty push. It went in, barely, but was skewed hard to the left.
     "You know honey," I grunted, through gritted teeth, trying to muscle the bracket upright, "this is not ... the best moment."
     That was a weekend's work. The next weekend, I bolted in the legs of the Fort — huge honking 6-by-6ers. I was a little concerned that the cut was not exactly flush, but went halfway across the broad end of the beam and then jumped up 1/16th of an inch. The lumber place must not have had a saw big enough to do it in a single cut. A few of the beams also had cracks in them.
     Not terrible cracks, I decided. Normal, probably. I couldn't imagine dragging those beams back to Craftwood. So I pressed on. Across the top of the upright 6-by-6 beams, two 4-by-4 horizontals then a series of 2-by-6 joists, to hold up the floor, nearly 6 feet in the air (this was before the deadly porch collapse; I'd use 2-by-12 joists now. Instead, I will just have to hope that genetic Steinberg unpopularity prevents my boys from having too many friends over).
     As I began contemplating putting the floor down atop the joists, I ran into a problem. The Fort is basically a little house sitting on a 9-by-10-foot platform, with a little railed porch in front. The little house is framed by 4-by-4 beams, and I knew that if I merely screwed the beams to the floor, they wouldn't be as sturdy as if I put them through the floor and bolted them to the joists. But doing that meant making complicated cuts in the flooring, cuts my fancy new DeWalt chop saw couldn't do.
     I pondered: easy and unstable or difficult and locked in? The thing was wiggly as it was. The beams seemed to sway on the concrete footings. I was standing there, trying to figure out how to proceed, my stomach in a knot, when wife happened by — "Howzit going?" she said breezily. I started trying to explain the dilemma.
     "Do I bolt the post to the floor or have it go through the floor and bolt it to the beam?" She just looked at me. I said it several more times, in several ways, and she still didn't understand, and then I did something that scared both of us: I slammed my head against the joist, deliberately, out of frustration, a quick dip to the side and then a thud. I've never done something like that before in my life. She remembered something she had to do in the house.
     Things actually got worse from there. Taking the tough road — always the tough road — I fished a jig saw out of the basement and made the cuts in the first floorboard to accommodate the Fort beams, a laborious process, but mismeasured, and put one cut in the wrong place, so that the beam couldn't pass through. I thought of taking the jigsaw to my throat but, collecting myself, grabbed a new $14 cedar board and measured again, more carefully this time, measured twice in fact. The new board was an even better job — the cuts neat and precise — and I joyfully went to put the board in place. I was on the ladder, moving it into position when my wife came by, smiling.
     "I don't believe it!" I said, aghast. "I've done it again."
     "Done what?" my wife asked.
     "Cut the board wrong. I screwed up the measurement again!" She had a bright idea, but I just didn't want to hear it.
     "Can I suggest ..." she began.
     "No!" I shouted. "No you can't suggest! Leave me alone. I can't believe it. I did it again."
     "Can I share an idea with you ..." she said quickly.
     "No!" I snapped angrily. "No ideas. This is a disaster. I can't understand it." I raved on in this vein for a bit, until my wife said,
     "Flip the board over."
     Flip. The. Board. Over. Hope dawned. I wasn't as stupid as I thought, not at least in this instance. I flipped the board over. It fit. I had measured correctly, but then turned the board around.
     At that point I had decided to call it a day. Now 12 hours had passed. It was 3:19 a.m. and I was at the back door, hurrying to see my collapsed Fort. I flipped on the floodlights. The Fort was there, intact. I couldn't understand it. I had heard a crash then a tumble of lumber. It was not a dream. I walked out into the cool night, walked all around the Fort in the darkness, looking for a shattered timber, something, touching it lightly with my hand as if I couldn't believe it was still there. But it seemed fine. Eventually I went to bed, mystified.
     Later that morning, when the sun was out, I went back to look at the Fort. I walked around the Fort once, twice, then I noticed something in the driveway. The garbage can, where I had piled some wood scraps, was knocked over, probably by hungry raccoons. The lumber scraps had tumbled out — that was the crash and tumble I had heard. Not the Fort. At that exact moment my wife walked over and I unwisely told her what had happened. It took her five minutes to stop laughing.
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 10, 2003